All About Android: Android by the Beach: 114

Guests

News

Steve Kondik aka Cyanogen posted on G+ to tease an upcoming feature for the popular Android ROM: Incognito Mode on an app to app basis. In essence, the user can activate Incognito Mode for an app in order to block that app from receiving data the user deems private enough to not share. Want GPS on but don't want to broadcast that info with an app? Here ya go. No clue when it will be released but expect it in the future.

The Nexus 7 was heralded as one of the best tablets to hit the scene last Summer. Not one year later, people are changing their tune. Dustin Earley wrote about how his has slowed to a crawl with performance taking a huge hit over an extended period of time. Lag, touch responsiveness, stuttering UI… Reddit user KalenXI put it well: "All flash memory has a limited number of erase/write operations that can be done before it can no longer be reliably read. And as the IO controller has to do more and more error correction to compensate for the increase in error rate your read rate goes down." And went on to posit that garbage collection isn't happening properly. KalenXI continues "flash memory must be empty before it can be written to. … Garbage collection is supposed to go through and empty sectors that are no longer in use but if it's not doing that then it increases the write time because it has to erase whatever is on the memory first before it can be rewritten.

Interview with Bill and Brian

Book is based on the first five day class at Big Nerd Ranch. Java is a prerequisite for the lessons throughout this book. What is the best way for someone to tackle that prerequisite? Lessons learned while writing this book? Biggest takeaway for new developers interested in Android? Explain the methodology for teaching someone how to code for Android. How have some of the new announcements at this year's IO affected what and how you teach at Big Nerd Ranch?